7 ms·

The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It" The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect

by ch4s3 9y ago

The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It" The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself. It goes on to discuss Pichai is a leader/person and ends on the quote "As Pichai has learned, Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence"

the_cat_kittles 9y ago
i personally think "Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence" is a very good thing that deserves to be embraced. its kind of insane its taken this long, really. while being able to trust companies is ideal, i think there have been enough real examples now that its worth being much more skeptical of tech companies. i wonder if the crazy faith we used to have was a byproduct of some combination of big tech's interests being mostly aligned with the public, and the public being unaware of the activities big tech was up to that weren't.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Everybody loves an underdog, and for decades the personal computer and internet industries were not dominant at a national scale. Now they are, so they don't get the built-in support of underdog status anymore.
yahna 9y ago
> Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself TIL not showing fake news or having your advertisers associated with ISIS videos is "moving mountains".
- zaphar 9y ago
  You have a ready made fool proof automated solution to detecting an ISIS video or fake news ready to go? Because at the scale of youtube you can't do it with manual checking. If you do then Google would probably pay for it. If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    Yeah, the fundamental question here is if we really want, given the current state of technology, to have these massive-scale automated operations. I'm fairly ambivalent about many aspects there. Fake news is nothing new, it's at least as old as pubs and people in them spreading false rumors, but what's new is the expectation that there'd be a channel that would somehow protect people from it. But I do find the desire to disclaim responsibility for helping propagate malware, fraud, and certain types of content to be very distasteful.
    - zaphar 9y ago
      They aren't disclaiming responsibility though. That's the thing. They are building the best tools to manage it that they can. They might be disclaiming the ability to do it perfectly but they are most certainly trying.
- packetslave 9y ago
  While you're considering zaphar's post and mentally designing your "get rid of ISIS videos" system, remember that YouTube gets 400 hours of video uploaded every minute
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    So, you’d only need an average of 18,000 people on duty around the clock to do review of everything uploaded to YouTube. At $15/hour pay, that's only about $2.4 billion/year for reviewers; all told, with supervision and other overhead, maybe on the order of $7.5 billion/yr. It's probably not impossible for Google, and it wouldn't even make Google unprofitable. But it would make YouTube unprofitable.
    - packetslave 9y ago
      It's also (probably) not a scalable solution. Consider two additional points: 1) 400/minute is only the most recent public number I could find a source for. It appears to be from 2015. 2) In 2013 that number was 100/hour and in 2011 it was 48/hour. The growth of user-created video content isn't exactly slowing down (vlogs, etc.)
    - zaphar 9y ago
      Don't forget that your 15/hr employee is going to have to detect fake news despite their own personal biases. These are the same people that reshare fake news when on Facebook. You probably need some specialized training and more than one person to vet that news.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - wolco 9y ago
      15 dollars an hour? Those jobs would go to a place where the wage was 1.50 an hour or worse .15 an hour.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      You probably wouldn’t need to review every video – videos from YouTube partners such as Disney or VEVO partners could probably be exempt in the first place. Then you probably could let an AI pre-sort most of the videos, and have humans only skip through those videos to verify the AIs decision, instead of having to analyze them all at 1x speed. You’d probably only need a tenth of the manpower in that situation. And YouTube might even still be profitable with that.

by ch4s3 9y ago

the_cat_kittles 9y ago

i personally think "Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence" is a very good thing that deserves to be embraced. its kind of insane its taken this long, really. while being able to trust companies is ideal, i think there have been enough real examples now that its worth being much more skeptical of tech companies. i wonder if the crazy faith we used to have was a byproduct of some combination of big tech's interests being mostly aligned with the public, and the public being unaware of the activities big tech was up to that weren't.

rhizome 9y ago
Everybody loves an underdog, and for decades the personal computer and internet industries were not dominant at a national scale. Now they are, so they don't get the built-in support of underdog status anymore.

yahna 9y ago

> Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself TIL not showing fake news or having your advertisers associated with ISIS videos is "moving mountains".

zaphar 9y ago
You have a ready made fool proof automated solution to detecting an ISIS video or fake news ready to go? Because at the scale of youtube you can't do it with manual checking. If you do then Google would probably pay for it. If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.
- majormajor 9y ago
  Yeah, the fundamental question here is if we really want, given the current state of technology, to have these massive-scale automated operations. I'm fairly ambivalent about many aspects there. Fake news is nothing new, it's at least as old as pubs and people in them spreading false rumors, but what's new is the expectation that there'd be a channel that would somehow protect people from it. But I do find the desire to disclaim responsibility for helping propagate malware, fraud, and certain types of content to be very distasteful.
  - zaphar 9y ago
    They aren't disclaiming responsibility though. That's the thing. They are building the best tools to manage it that they can. They might be disclaiming the ability to do it perfectly but they are most certainly trying.
packetslave 9y ago
While you're considering zaphar's post and mentally designing your "get rid of ISIS videos" system, remember that YouTube gets 400 hours of video uploaded every minute
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  So, you’d only need an average of 18,000 people on duty around the clock to do review of everything uploaded to YouTube. At $15/hour pay, that's only about $2.4 billion/year for reviewers; all told, with supervision and other overhead, maybe on the order of $7.5 billion/yr. It's probably not impossible for Google, and it wouldn't even make Google unprofitable. But it would make YouTube unprofitable.
  - packetslave 9y ago
    It's also (probably) not a scalable solution. Consider two additional points: 1) 400/minute is only the most recent public number I could find a source for. It appears to be from 2015. 2) In 2013 that number was 100/hour and in 2011 it was 48/hour. The growth of user-created video content isn't exactly slowing down (vlogs, etc.)
  - zaphar 9y ago
    Don't forget that your 15/hr employee is going to have to detect fake news despite their own personal biases. These are the same people that reshare fake news when on Facebook. You probably need some specialized training and more than one person to vet that news.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolco 9y ago
    15 dollars an hour? Those jobs would go to a place where the wage was 1.50 an hour or worse .15 an hour.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    You probably wouldn’t need to review every video – videos from YouTube partners such as Disney or VEVO partners could probably be exempt in the first place. Then you probably could let an AI pre-sort most of the videos, and have humans only skip through those videos to verify the AIs decision, instead of having to analyze them all at 1x speed. You’d probably only need a tenth of the manpower in that situation. And YouTube might even still be profitable with that.